* * * This is true ; but sportsmen ought
to make it a point of honour to reduce the cruelty to the minimum, to be stark reformers in purging their sport, whatever it may be, of any- thing that is ignoble or needlessly cruel. More than this : the higher the nervous sensibility of the animal they pursue, the more punctilious they should be. Probably the deer is the most sensitive, the most capable of pain, of all hunted animals. Jorrocks' much quoted dictum : " The 'ounds like it, the 'orses like it and we don't know as the fox don't like it," has a certain amount of justification in natural history. The animals that live by killing, the vermin, have a fighting instinct which does not yield to fear—and fear is more painful than wounds—even in extremis. The rat dies fighting, is savage to the last. The stag will defend himself (cet animal est mechant : quand on ratlaque, it se defend) but it is capable of prolonged terror, is highly strung, has qualities that we may call noble. It is for this reason, and on the animal's account, that many sportsmen will put themselves on the side of the humanitarian in the protest against these recent episodes. Nat to put too fine a point on it, there are certain forms of stag-hunting which ought to be done away, to be classed with extinct barbarities, such as " the Welsh Main " in cock-fighting or badger-baiting. It is cruel, artificial and in some aspects as little democratic as was the shooting of deer in the New Forest five centuries ago.
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